Retaining Visitors During a Traffic Spike
Every marketer or website owners dreams of that traffic spike. Crashing servers, thousands of unique visitors per hour. The Digg Effect. The TechCrunch Effect. Call it what you want, but powerful sources have ways of driving enormous amounts of traffic to your website within a short period of time. Many websites are not prepared for such amounts of traffic not only because they can't scale, but also because they are not setup to foster repeat visits. The traffic will hit a spike within hours of the initial posting, and only decline for weeks, even months, until it stabilizes and continues along its pattern of organic growth. Web properties vulnerable to these social media spikes, generally blogs, online startups, or social media websites themselves, should be properly setup to take advantage of traffic influxes.
